5. Self-as-Method,

Globalization and Anti-Globalization

Let me say “Merry Christmas” (today) to those of the Christian faith. Whether you are renewing your relationship to God and Jesus, enjoying family connections with dinner and a get-together, or just imbibing the holiday spirit around Christmas and New Year’s, I wish you all the best.

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Wu Qi: In the past few years, scholars inside and outside of China have been paying close attention to international news treating the US election and Brexit, and their moods have varied widely, but they have come to feel that the progress of globalization is in crisis. What are your thoughts about this? Has this influenced your assessment of globalization?

Xiang Biao: I think it’s funny when people in the United States say the victory of Trump is a crisis, the darkest day in the history of humanity. In China, “crisis” was an important concept in the 1980s. It was said that China had to have a “crisis consciousness,*” otherwise it might lose its “right to exist on the planet (qiuji*).” “River Elegy” also talked about the civilizational crisis. But this was a crisis that intellectuals fabricated themselves. What is a crisis? In the practice of the lives of everyday people, when young peoples’ friendships fall apart, this might be a crisis; when you gamble in the stock market and lose, this is not necessarily a crisis, but if you’ve already bragged to your friends that you were going to make money when in fact you lose, this might be a crisis. A crisis is not merely a failure, it’s a failure without an explanation.

Whether Trump’s election could be a crisis for world development is a question intellectuals made up themselves. It is a fact that Trump was elected, and we have to understand why. The most important thing is that the Democrats did not do a good job in Wisconsin and other swing states, which meant that the vote in those states suddenly changed, and the reason for this is that heavy industry declined in these areas. This truly is a bit contingent and does not reflect a major change in America as a whole, and to get a grasp of how important it is we would have to get a sense of proportion. After all, more people still voted for the Democrats. Now they are talking about Russian interference, which is kind of funny. Aren’t Americans stirring up color revolutions everywhere, all the time?

Second, even if Russia did interfere by influencing public opinion, when people voted they were crystal clear on the policies and the person they voted for. My feeling is that all of this is just an attempt by the middle class to find an explanation for something they don’t understand, and is an exaggeration of the crisis. I prefer to look at all this noise with a sense of distance to try to see what the underlying issue is. My first thought was that this was an adjustment between two Americas, one being a globalized, elite America, and the other being a local, populist America. Trump represented a reaction of populist America against the elites. In the long term, there is no clear evidence that Trump will have a disastrous effect on the world situation.

A sense of distance is the same thing as a sense of history. When certain things happen, I sense that there is no need to go overboard looking for a symbolic explanation. Life is not all that long, only 70 or 80 years, and if during that time something happens for two or three days, then we should put it in context and assess its importance. History always changes like this. I feel a certain sense of distance from Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), and do not see him as my spiritual guide, but I appreciate the sense of distance he attached to his analysis of world history. He never made direct judgments, but rather offered reminders, saying that we cannot know at present whether history is unfolding in a good or bad way, but here are the possible dangers. What he offers is a cautious pushback from an intellectual’s perspective, and while most people are swept up in the big trends, he sees through them, offering a gentle reminder of the factors behind the trends. His reminders are based on careful analysis and observation and are not merely on general principles.

In the 1950s, there was an important debate at Oxford on “What is History?” between Isaiah Berlin and the leftist historian Edward Hallett Carr (1882–1982), based on their different views of how to understand the success of the Soviet Union. At first, I was on Carr’s side, but later on, came to feel that Berlin made important points as well. To put it simply, Carr said that the USSR had already succeeded and that the role of historians was to explain why it succeeded because we need to know why it happened. Of course, he is right, and when today’s liberals are saying that Trump is a disaster, they are not looking at the background factors that explain the “disaster.” But Berlin’s view was that we don’t know if some necessary force explains the success of the Soviet Union, because all historical facts are the product of many contingent factors, nor do we know what the final outcome will be. What we can do today is based on historical experience, and our own moral principles, to issue warnings and reminders concerning where possible dangers might be, what impact present developments might have. We need to be prepared, and not just explain the facts as they are. Both ways of thinking are important.

Wu Qi: Trump nonetheless represents an agenda that is anti-globalization and pro-protectionism, in which all countries retreat within their own borders. Younger generations have more directly and widely benefitted from globalization, which is why many of them dislike Trump. In your experience of working on globalization, have you seen anything that tells you that the tide of globalization is turning?

Xiang Biao: Right now, a lot of anti-globalization is just talk, and we don’t know what the result of Trump’s policies will be on issues like taxes and the environment. Of course, the discourse itself is important; it is anti-globalization, but the discourse itself is a global phenomenon because people are talking about it everywhere. This is like decolonization from the 1940s through the 1960s, when the original unified colonial markets became independent countries, which was also an important process of globalization. National independence was a global movement, global dialogue and exchange involving Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From that perspective, I don’t quite know what the true impact of the call for anti-globalization is on the thoughts and behavior of young people. China is a big country and enjoys the great advantage that even if everyone is not engaged in globalization, there is a lot of space left within the country. This issue of globalization and anti-globalization may be a bit made-up, by which I mean we are often misled by terms used by the media.

Wu Qi: On this issue, in China, there has been another reaction, which is a resurgence of patriotism. At the same time that some people are saddened by restrictions on globalization (you just gave your opinion on that), another group of young people has embraced a narrative of China that is even more local, even more nationalistic. Maybe we could compare this process with the rise of populism in the United States and Europe, since they occurred pretty much at the same time.

Xiang Biao: First, whether this is anti-globalization depends on our definition. We usually say that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, all of communism was swept up in the Western-led global market economy, the advancement of technology and transportation, the whole “end of history” thing—in which history was no longer pushed forward by the dialectical movement of antagonistic contradictions, and instead, everyone identified with certain ideas, and we all moved forward smoothly together. As to whether Brexit and Trump mean that they are against this process, that they want to reduce international trade and international exchange, so that contradictions once again become the main motor of progress—I think it’s too early to tell.

Brexit is actually quite complicated. Many of those who voted to leave the European Union were farmers who have not fared well in recent years, and whose lives are difficult, but the true leaders of Brexit, like Boris Johnson, belong to the elite. This made up the so-called blue-collar purple socks pact. “Blue collar” means the working class, and “purple socks” means the upper class, because British upper-class gentlemen often appear in gray suits and sport bright-colored socks, but why would the purple socks want to leave? These people have no sense of nationalism. An Indian author once wrote that Britain has monarchism, republicanism, and racism, but no nationalism, because Britain has always looked at the world from its imperial perspective, and when Britain became a nation, it took the form of a global empire.

What Boris Johnson says is that he wants to return to the glory the United Kingdom knew as an imperial power, and that Britain has always been a global power, so why are they now wasting time with European officials in Brussels? This is what he said to voters, that once Brexit succeeded, Britain’s relations with China and with India would be even better, and he is no doubt expecting to have a free trade deal with the United States, which would make up for the losses incurred by leaving Europe. It is hard to say if this is a return to the model of the nation-state as the principal player. From the American perspective, abandoning globalization is truly hard to imagine, because most of the American economy is global, and its trade war with China is about a fight over who will control the globe and the basic technology of 5G, etc. This is not a fight between two countries, but a fight between two world powers. For this reason, globalization will not diminish. Instead, it means that from now on, the global lens through which we analyze questions has to become all the more acute. This is the first thing.

Second, it also means that the concrete form of globalization can certainly change. At the outset, we thought that globalization was like a solution to China’s developmental problems. In China’s reform and opening, the opening was more important than reform, and in fact, the more open we were the more momentum we gained for reform. Deng Xiaoping said that we had to learn from the outside world, open markets to foreigners in order to obtain foreign technology, and therefore promote internal reform. Now it seems that globalization is not necessarily a solution to all our problems, and may even bring new problems and dilemmas.

You mentioned the China narrative. Many people in China feel the need to tell such a narrative because we have the ingredients, the self-confidence, and the stamina to tell China’s story. But my point is that such a psychological need is itself a problem. Why is One Belt-One Road a China story? What do the Pakistanis or the Ethiopians involved in the project have to say about it? This is complicated. If you talk with Chinese diplomats, especially those involved with foreign trade or finance, or those who are building projects, you might discover that they have difficulties they cannot talk about, because they don’t want to make everything related to One Belt-One Road a “China story.” Because if that’s how things are, then the eyes of the world are focused on you, thinking that your investments are all the results of Beijing’s strategic plot. While in matter of fact, many times there’s a Chinese guy who can’t sell his shoes in China, so he goes to Africa, but once they are out of China, everyone else thinks that the Sichuanese workers, the Henanese farmers, and the Wenzhou people selling lighters, are all part of the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, that they are all part of the One Belt-One Road plan. Given the size of China’s economy, it is normal that people leave, whether they have the support of the authorities or not. And yet we insist on making these rich and varied stories into one story, stressing out people who don’t need more stress.

So, from where I stand, the China narrative is quite narrow-minded and is trying to define the self in terms of formal institutions. You are a Chinese person, born and raised in China, this is a fact, but when you look at things, you might be a mother, or a daughter, or a 60-year-old retired teacher, all of whom will have their own perspective on things. When you take a trip to Thailand, you might be interested in how retirees there spend their free time, or when you go to Europe, you might feel close to European mothers. Even more important, you are all ordinary people, with no connection to state power, not knowing much about state policy, so why should you look at the world from the state perspective? Those who feel that they must have a China narrative may do so because of some feeling of insecurity in their own lives, and thus they need to tie everything up in a huge ribbon to feel secure.

Wu Qi: Can we keep teasing out the China narrative? In an anthropological sense, there are a lot of people today who are embracing rural philosophies and everyday life, in political practice we’ve had the “people’s philosophy,” if we go back further there is traditional thought, which even today can boast of certain concrete achievements. Which of these do you feel are healthy or meaningful?

Xiang Biao: It is indeed more meaningful to unpack the China narrative and look at specific issues. For example, if we compare our levels of economy and life expectancy with those of India, then China’s results are better. But now, China’s overall situation in terms of public health and education is facing new crises. The number of children that drop out of school is quite high, and education in the villages has run into many difficulties. When we look at successful experiences and emphasize that these are Chinese experiences, Chinese characteristics, then what was China doing in the four thousand years before we achieved these successes? How did we wind up so backward? What are the reasons behind our current success and why is education again in crisis, we have to look at all of this historically. All of this is happening in China, and there are lots of Chinese elements involved, but you cannot conclude that the results we get are because China did it. There are many factors working together in the context of China. Social science tries to disentangle these elements and look at them one by one, to figure out which are the core elements.

One way to unpack the China narrative into specific questions is through comparison, for instance comparing China’s success with that of South Korea, one of the original “Four Asian Dragons,” or with Europe. Europe may not be handling things particularly well at the moment, while China can mobilize an entire province or the entire country to get something done, which is impressive. But the thing is that you also have to think about next year, about what effect your way of doing things will have ten years on. Europe is more mature about this. It’s true that there are protests and demonstrations every day, and people complain constantly, but this is what Europe is, and it is also a form of political wisdom. It may well be that no Chinese would want to be Prime Minister of Britain, who gets yelled at all day, every day. It’s unpleasant, and no one sings your praises. But the politicians seem to enjoy it, and feel like responding to the challenges of their political enemies is an occasion to test their political wisdom. Chinese culture would have a hard time accepting this. But this is what life is, right? In your family life you can’t have projects or achievements every day; every morning you talk about what’s for breakfast, and one person chooses soy milk while the other eats a doughnut.

The other way of unpacking the China narrative has to do with the method of evaluation. How do we decide what “success” is? From whose point of view? In what time frame? For example, the debate between Qin Hui* (b. 1953) and Lü Xinyu* (b. 1965) on slums is valuable.1 Our cities don’t have slums, which is a great achievement for China, but from a farmer’s perspective, a slum is one more life possibility, a step toward the city, which does not exist without the ghetto. If you look at India and the Philippines, slums have become an important political force, whereas in China we just demolish whatever we want to demolish, and the cost of living keeps going up, which creates a lot of pressure. This is part of an intellectual’s training, to not get overexcited about something without understanding it. If we say China’s cities are well-run, then we also have to ask: Where are the people that used to be there, and what do they think about all this? Why were similar people in other countries not moved out of the slums? We have to look at things from both sides.

1 Translator’s note: Qin Hui is a liberal historian who has written a great deal about China’s exploitation of migrant labor. One of his arguments is that the absence of slums in China’s cities—in comparison with other developing countries—was yet another obstacle faced by peasants who might want to leave the villages for a better life, and would settle in slums as their most affordable option. Lü Xinyu, a New Left specialist in Media Studies, argued that China should improve living conditions in the villages instead of allowing urban slums. The two figures engaged in a very public debate on the subject in the early 2010s.

Using the 1980s to Critique the 1980s

Wu Qi: The background to globalization also has a domestic context, in other words, everyone’s unreserved embrace of and expectations for the discourse of opening and modernization might be related to what we talked about when discussing the 1980s, which may be a more recent starting point. Your description of the changes in Chinese society and thought since the 1980s is different from some mainstream views in China. Many people have a certain nostalgia for the 1980s, seeing it as a sort of golden age, especially compared to where we are today in the twenty-first century, with the passing of the humanistic spirit and the Enlightenment, with intellectuals having been pushed from the center to the margins, falling from the altar of the gods. This is how those intellectuals tell the story. But from another perspective, in terms of popular opinion, with the spread of Internet technology, the debate is still possible, and even more, all people can express their opinion. This perspective seems to challenge intellectuals’ nostalgia for the 1980s, which is also backed up by the rise of Trump and populism. What went into your understanding of the 1980s?

Xiang Biao: My view of the 1980s was basically emotional, something like when Lu Xun*1 (1881–1936) said “my heart could not but be suspicious.” “Suspicious” is a lovely word, I like it a lot. I also like Hu Shi’s*2 (1891–1962) style a lot. He’s a British-style empiricist and pragmatist. Once, Gao Pingzi’s*3 (1888–1970) grandson told Hu Shi that he wanted to carry forward Zhang Zai’s* (1020–1077) vision of “building up the manifestations of Heaven and Earth’s spirit, building up good life for the people, developing the endangered scholarship of past sages, and opening up eternal peace for the world.”4 Hu Shi asked him to explain what he meant by “building up the manifestations of Heaven and Earth’s spirit,” and told him that his grandfather was an astronomer and that he should not use incomprehensible language like that. For Hu Shi, words have to have some empirical basis, and words like Zhang’s are empty, nothing more than fleeting emotions. On this question, I feel really grateful to the New Left scholar Wang Hui (b. 1959). The conscious distance I took from the 1980s is to a large degree the result of his influence. He lived through that period, and not as an elitist. He believes that intellectuals should unite with workers and peasants, and follow the mass line*.

I am happy to know that we are having this debate today. I think the original mass line was too romanticized and not well implemented, which means that we don’t have successful examples to follow now, but we should practice the mass line in today’s intellectual and artistic work because when you look at the degree of social media penetration and the educational level we have achieved, it is no longer the same “mass” as before. At present, intellectuals are not doing their job well. It is not feasible to completely rely on the masses in intellectual and artistic work, because we still need tools and guides. We do not have to lead them, necessarily, but they have to be organized, like into groups and subgroups, with topics for everyone to discuss.

1 Translator’s note: Lu Xun is considered modern China’s most talented writer.

2 Translator’s note: Hu Shi was a well-known scholar and politician in Republican China, known as a pragmatist and a promoter of Westernization.

3 Translator’s note: Gao Pingzi is considered the founder of modern astronomy in China.

4 Translator’s note: Zhang Zai was a Confucian scholar and politician. This passage is taken from Zhang’s “Western Inscription,” often considered a concise summary of Neo-Confucianism.

Wu Qi: Could you be a bit more specific on how the “culture craze” wound up being separated from life practice?

Xiang Biao: It sounds funny when you say that, because in the 1980s there were so many intellectual debates, so much “thought,” and many intellectuals today are nostalgic for the excitement of the 1980s. I am not going to deny the importance of all of that, but at the same time would like to remind everyone that at present it is not worth it to bring back the fervor of the 1980s. What we need to engage in now is a reflection that is much more down-to-earth, much more concrete. We need to link up directly with mass experience, an analysis of the political economy, with our understanding of technology. If we think about Wang Yuanhua’s*5 (1920–2008) characterization of the early 1990s as a time of “deemphasizing intellectual thought and promoting academic research,” then looking at it now, it seems that it is entirely possible to bring thought and academic research together. Indeed, today’s thought must be based on professional investigation and research, as well as careful reflection. In fact, it all comes down to being clear on what has actually happened, and not what we should do; I don’t really buy the so-called top-down design theory, because it’s too hard to do. When politicians are doing important strategic planning, they of course need judgment and a sense of direction, but this is not really top-down design, but instead just a good grasp of strategy. The word Wang Hui uses to describe the 1980s debates among intellectuals is “gesture.” I think this is an apt description, in that there really are a lot of us who are constantly making gestures, arriving at big conclusions without having explained what happened clearly.

Wu Qi: Where did things go off the rails?

Xiang Biao: Intellectuals in the 1980s were a lot like educated youth. As I wrote in my “The Age of Educated Youth,” “educated youth” did not in fact refer to educated young people, but more primarily to youth educated in big and middle-sized cities, and finally, they represent something close to the idea of “children of high-level cadres.” When we say the word “educated youth,” everyone immediately thinks of the youth of Beijing and Shanghai. There are many things here that have been completely blown out of proportion, like the stories that have circulated for many years of female educated youth that were raped by village cadres.

5 Translator’s note: Wang Yuanhua was a well-respected intellectual who served the Party for much of his life, becoming more “liberal” in the most-Mao period. He was an inspiration to many Chinese intellectuals active in the 1980s.

Rape is of course a crime, but there’s a reason that stories like those have lingered, and that has to do with the relationship between the countryside and the cities, a narrative on the suffering of the educated youth. Female educated youth are portrayed as the purest of things, and when they were despoiled by village cadres, it was the most beautiful thing being destroyed by the vilest thing.

Many of the questions people thought about in the 1980s were very important, and given the place in history occupied by the period, the fervor was normal and valuable. At the time people talked about an “intellectual realm,” which meant, in my understanding, that at the time, there was no division between the state and the intellectual world, and the most important thing was the divisions that appeared within the intellectual elites themselves. The reason for that was that elites at the time were indulging more and more in gestures, for example, the debate in the Shanghai World Economic Herald*6 over whether the entire public ownership system should be abolished, which from the standpoint of practicality made absolutely no sense.

Wu Qi: This is a lot like today when everyone thinks that populism means the rise of the masses, but in fact behind populism are the elites, and all of this is a new struggle within the world of the elites. If we were to cut our ties with the world of elite gestures, and take leave of the established world of intellectuals and their cultural circles, what position should we take up?

Xiang Biao: There are still some differences. In the 1980s, everyone thought that intellectuals represented the wisdom of the people. There was a strong moral tint to things, and intellectuals were speaking in the place of the state. Now intellectuals feel like they are just another social group out to make money and have a good life. They are not trying to represent anyone. Beginning in the 1990s intellectuals were increasingly marginalized, and were no longer spiritual leaders. At the time I had just entered university and learned the word “disenchantment,” which meant that people who had been talking about spiritual excitement were now more realistic, which is a general trend within modernity. A typical example was Liu Zaifu* (b. 1941), the writer who said that in the United States, everyone believed that basketball players were more important than university professors, and at the airport, everyone asked basketball players and celebrities for their autograph. Liu thought this was a good thing, an example of commercialization increasing democratic participation. At the time I sympathized with this view because I disliked pretentious posturing.

6 Translator’s note: The World Economic Herald was an independent newspaper which for a certain period enjoyed the support of certain CCP leaders, which gave the journal the latitude to publish quite daring opinion pieces.

But today, we are not only marginalized but also isolated. At the time, my expectations were that, with marginalization, intellectuals would become more organic, would no longer be purely abstract intellectuals, and would have specific statuses. Being organic is being limited. It must be linked to society in specific ways and cannot stay at the level of general theories. We have not seen many such connections taking place, instead, we’ve gotten more narrow and more specialized. The Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) said that truly organic intellectuals were technicians, or people who promote agricultural technology, or barefoot doctors, or subaltern writers, who indeed can do a lot. Today it is difficult for university professors, including myself, to produce an accurate understanding and description of society. The real insiders are the people who can provide immediate insight into problems. Delivery people, for example, have to think through many issues too. There are people like that, there are vehicles such as social media to convey what they think, and we should encourage them to write more.

Wu Qi: So for you, what is the spiritual heritage of the 1980s?

Xiang Biao: For me, the spiritual heritage of the 1980s was all of those slogans, the bold, skeptical attitudes, and dispositions, and the demands for institutional and structural change. It came from a spiritually deep place and was based on foundational principles, a feeling that current reality had to be transcended, and needed to be changed. It had the feeling of Mao’s poem, when he talked about “pointing to our mountains and rivers, setting people afire with our words.”7 Without that baptism, without that body of spiritual wealth, I don’t think I would feel much about this kind of macro-narrative. Those kinds of things excite us easily. Of course, this is two-sided, and it’s hard to say if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Especially if we want to compare ourselves to Western scholars, the good side is that we want to see big pictures, will not be satisfied with a simple explanation of the status quo, and will always make systemic criticisms. But at the same time, this attitude means that we lose the ability to observe reality in a more precise way since we’re always in a hurry to arrive at a more abstract narrative.

7 Translator’s note: The passage is taken from Mao’s poem “Changsha,” written in 1925.

The bigger question is, why did this spiritual heritage not congeal into something more lasting? Why did it not become a good ecological system for the production of knowledge? The styles of the 1980s were too homogenous, and instead of coming together with others, they wiped one another out. It’s like Beida’s “heroic” view of itself. Self-heroism is fine, but it has to exist in a dialogue with other people to become a healthy ecosystem. If everyone is running around “setting people afire with their words,” we’ll burn everything down and it will all come to nothing.

Wu Qi: Could we say that your own research has always kept a certain distance from the main themes of the 1980s?

Xiang Biao: This is true in terms of specific research topics, but from another angle, without the 1980s’ fix on the world, I could not have hopped on the public bus to Muxiyuan to do Zhejiang Village in my second year of university, in the middle of the winter, which was a kind of romantic thing to do, one that I wouldn’t have done had I been thinking realistically. The 1980s influence on me is still important, that kind of impulse, a dissatisfaction with the status quo, the urge to do something to shock people. It is mainly a spiritual disposition, without much methodological or theoretical value.

Wu Qi: This is a supplement to your argument against elitism, and not a complete denial, right?

Xiang Biao: That feeling of transcendence, the idea that we could criticize our teachers, all of that was the spirit of the 1980s, otherwise we would not have engaged in our criticism, and would have just gone on to make money. Most people see the 1980s as idealistic, and I think that’s a pretty good term for it, because what we call idealism is first a form of transcendence, and the value of existence lies in transcending the status quo, seeking after things that don’t exist in front of your eyes. In this sense, when I use the spirit of the 1980s to critique the 1980s, it is also a kind of revolt, or transcendence, or ideal. In concrete terms it’s about being bold, not obeying authority, which was the 1980s, and maybe Beida as well.

What is Criticism?

Wu Qi: In what specific ways has Wang Hui influenced you? Which scholars have had the most influence on you?

Xiang Biao: In terms of specific questions, such as how to view the 1980s, as well as in terms of broader significance, Wang Hui’s perspective and his new way of thinking were a source of inspiration for me. He is a scholar with a firm and distinct viewpoint, and this viewpoint is not a simple posture or some kind of label. He is open-minded in his analysis, and he makes no judgments based on preconceptions. In addition, he particularly emphasizes getting inside of history and has a very sensitive and lively way of entering into a dialogue with history. So, watching how he works and how he thinks has been enlightenment for me.

Prasenjit Duara1 also had a fairly big influence on me. Duara first got interested in China because of the story of the early Chinese revolutionary Peng Pai* (1896–1929), and wondered why someone from a landlord background could betray his own class, return home, divide the land, and carry out land reform. Actually, Duara’s first degree was in business, he was raised in a fairly well-off family, has loved music all his life, and became interested in intellectual questions after he had quite a bit of life exposure. It took time. His journey is something that we can learn from.

1 Translator’s note: Duara is an Indian-born historian of China who currently teaches at Duke University in the United States.

A third person that influenced me a lot is Vani, my friend from Singapore. She is a lot older than I am, she’s in her sixties and has no proper job. She used to be the editor of a journal, and helped to edit my Zhejiang Village book as well as Global “Body Shopping.” Her greatest help and inspiration to me was to help me to see how ideas and knowledge can be so lively. She is not a specialized scholar, but has a keen interest in geography, plants, pharmaceutical knowledge, as well as philosophy and art, and has a lot to say about current political and economic issues. Her views always come naturally and hit the mark, and are full of critical curiosity about the world. She constantly alerted me that there are different angles from which to look at things. She is quite a unique person. She abandoned all material pursuits, and the joy she takes in life and her appreciation of art allowed me to see the importance of art.

Wu Qi: Tell me about the importance of art.

Xiang Biao: I was lucky enough to study painting when I was young, so I have a bit of grounding in that, but I know nothing about music, which is a shortcoming, and it is something that is hard to learn once you are an adult. Music is probably linked to mathematics, because both transcend culture and language, which is why people like the German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) felt that music embodies the internal structure of the mind of humanity. Why is it that everyone feels that certain music is harmonious, like Chopin’s piano concertos, if it is not a question of the internal structure of the human mind? Musical training can be quite important to mental and psychological health. The writer Eva Hoffman (b. 1945) studied piano as a child, and she argues that piano was very valuable in learning about accuracy, because there is no way to hide even the slightest error when playing piano, and if the rhythm is even slightly off nothing works. This is like math. Yet a foundation of rigor and precision provides a great deal of space for improvisation and can lead to mental relaxation. This is a kind of beauty that is beyond language. I put a lot of stress on accuracy and rigor, which are important to social science, creative writing, and non-fiction writing, and in the absence of accurate techniques, it is hard to produce anything that is artistic or creative. Everything is produced little by little, so we need to pay attention to the material process of production.

“Material” includes what space you are in, what tea you drink, and what kind of paper you use. I think it was the historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) who said that things that look really big, like global, long-distance commerce, are in fact made up of small links. Zheng He’s* (1371–1433) voyages2 were the same thing so that China’s travel to East Africa did not involve an abstract China and an abstract Africa; the ships involved had to visit a lot of shores, proceeding one step at a time, so you have to look at the entire material process. If you think about it this way, it’s a fairly good way to work and a good attitude toward life.

Art is somewhat similar to the legal system, and the way lawyers work. When I was a kid, I found the whole lawyer thing really strange. If it is clear that the guy is guilty, why do we need a lawyer to defend him? But the idea of a “defense” is really important, in the sense that we have to assume that we do not know what happened, and through the process of “defense” the truth comes out, and we may discover that our initial conclusions were wrong! Scholarship is the same. You can’t rely on intuition to make judgments, but have to prove your points, and show how you reached your conclusions. Often it is the case that the clearer the conclusion, the harder it is to prove, but once you have proven it, then you’ve made a big contribution. For example, how do you prove that one plus one equals two? Why do you need to prove it? But once you’ve proven it and illustrated the process involved, it will have an influence on lots of basic theory.

Of course, I don’t want to overemphasize procedural justice, because I have discovered, in the process of doing fieldwork, that procedural justice can be used and even manipulated by people with legal resources, but I accept it as a basic concept. Only if you accept the result because of the process, can you establish a substantive relationship with the result, even if you still have doubts. Research and life are also like this, always processes of open dialogue. Research means participating in a dialogue, changing the form of the dialogue, raising new questions in the course of the dialogue—this process itself is the most important.

Wu Qi: You mentioned a lot of left-wing scholars and ideas, but in your previous interviews and arguments, my impression is that you did not use the term “left-wing” explicitly. Maybe this has to do with the way in which you express yourself, in that you don’t talk a lot about your own viewpoint. Is it that you have not had the chance to do so, or that you prefer not to make that kind of statement?

2 Translator: Zheng He led a series of maritime voyages to Southeast Asia, India, and even East Africa in the early fifteenth century.

Xiang Biao: First, I feel like there is no need to talk about a general left-wing standpoint. I have never felt the need, nor had the ability, to position myself on a broad intellectual spectrum. What I’m good at is getting into an issue concretely, finding a window, and seeing contradictions. So, in my view, how you think has to do with specific questions and with your object of study. The way I work is to look at contradictions in the thing itself, the type of contradictions that affect actors but which the actors can’t explain to themselves sufficiently. This is how I try to engage myself.

Wu Qi: When you are trying to understand or when you are getting into the problem, sometimes you can’t help having to choose the perspective or standpoint of one side or the other, or you may unconsciously identify with a particular side. What do you do in situations like that?

Xiang Biao: If it’s a conflict between the weak and the strong, obviously everyone sympathizes with the weak. Because my specialty is fieldwork and social analysis, where a key concept is “relationships,” what I emphasize is not that the weak deserve protection. What is more important is why the weak are weak, which obviously is the same question as why the strong are strong, which has to be the result of a historical process. As a citizen or as a person, in my conclusions, I take the side of the weak, but in fact, what I spend most of my time on is not taking sides. For example, the weak may have a lot of flaws—I say this not to criticize them—these are limitations imposed on them by history, which need to be fully understood too.

Wu Qi: Then what about the critical nature of research?

Xiang Biao: The Frankfurt School was obviously important; it shows that a central element of critical theory is not to explain things away. It’s the opposite—when people think there is no problem, theory, by explaining things, allows people to discover that there are problems here, and the idea is to explain more and more of them. Of course, you want to explain complex things in simple ways, so that everyone can understand. There is no point in making things more and more complicated, but at the same time, you also want to explain the internal contradictions and latent problems in a situation that at first seemed to be unproblematic, illustrating things that don’t make sense. Here, “criticism” does not mean calling out a group for having done something wrong, in the sense of moral responsibility; instead, you are challenging our current state of knowledge. The “knowledge” that we carry around in our heads is necessarily mainstream knowledge, which means that we need to be self-critical as well.

Wu Qi: When I was in university, I was very influenced by critical theory, an influence that affected a lot of my later choices, but more recently I have started to feel like the voices of the older generation of critical intellectuals is starting to lose touch with younger groups. It’s like this generation of young people does not want to get too close to that world, or maybe doesn’t know how. Here maybe there is a need for critical theory to be self-critical.

Xiang Biao: Can you be a bit more specific about what the problem is? Are they concerned about other things, or are they choosing different approaches?

Wu Qi: I think it has to do with what they are concerned about. For example, when academics talk about something that happened in Latin America or the Middle East, young people think, “Why do they care about Latin America? That has nothing to do with me personally.” So, they don’t see the point. When I interviewed Professor Dai Jinhua, she mentioned that she was giving up on communicating with young people, because she discovered a huge fissure between her and them in the sense that their individualism has become too pronounced, to the point that they cannot develop empathy for other people, and see them only as tools to be used. My view is not quite so extreme, but I do feel that the framework has changed, and that people around me don’t talk about other people or about ideas like equality and fairness, or that it is no longer natural to talk about such things. People talk about love, but more and more this means their love life, and things like family feelings are becoming a relic or a burden from the premodern period.

Xiang Biao: This is something I would like to know more about, meaning what it is that young people are thinking about these days. First, self-perceptions and public consciousness are linked. Sometimes the link is not clear, and you have to look for it. Let’s take the example of the idea of a “loser,”3 which is a negative self-perception, and is completely based in the ideology of equality. The loser says, “I’m a failure, which makes me a loser, but it’s not that I’m incompetent, and instead that society treats me unfairly. So, I accept what I am, but I make fun of society.” So, behind any definition, an individual gives himself there is always a public consciousness involved. There may be positive energy in this, and I want to find the positive energy.

3 Translator’s note: The word Xiang uses for “loser,” diaosi*, is recently coined Internet slang, and is part of the “melancholy” outlook of Chinese young people discussed above.

We really cannot discuss equality or love in an abstract sense, because they are concrete, and you have to start with a particular lived experience. There have to be principles involved in love, but if you just talk about the principles in the absence of the concrete situation it quickly gets meaningless. Recently, the Sichuan Daily published an article by an invited commentator who is worried that there are too many “leftover women,”4 and urged them not to be too picky or too romantic, otherwise they will never find a partner, and the BBC included the article in their international news. At the same time, people in the marriage market are very calculating. This is shocking for people of my age. We never thought about such things when we were dating in university. Young people today think love is something sublime, and they are eager to throw themselves into it, but they feel lost in reality, because they are concerned with this or that practical issue. So, love becomes fragile, like a beautiful glass ball that can break anytime. If we can offer some language that will help them to grasp the complexity of their lives and see the contradictions clearly, such analyses can enter into their lives and perhaps be of some help.

For example, Plato says that love allows you to return to your original human state. This original self was made up of two parts that combined to constitute a personality. The two parts later split, and love allows you to find the other half. This sounds very romantic, but it is consistent with much anthropological thinking. Modern individualism believes that life starts with the individual, after which comes groups and society, but Durkheim and Mauss believe that this is a limited Western view and that many societies elsewhere in the world do not think this way at all. First, there are totems, and symbols of the group that define the group as a whole, and only after the group is defined is the individual acknowledged. Individual consciousness comes from group consciousness, which means that group consciousness is the prerequisite for individual consciousness and not its result. When Australian aboriginal groups count cattle, they don’t count them one by one. The meaning of “one” is one group of cattle, one tribe, and an individual within a tribe is a small “one.” Plato’s concept of love also suggests that the self was always incomplete, and needs to join with other subjects.

4 Translator’s note: The term is shengnü*, a generally derogatory way to refer to unmarried women.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) also gave us an interesting tool. He argues that love is making an accidental occurrence into something sustainable, which makes love into a daily job. In the beginning, it may have been love at first sight, but you have to nourish that initial flame. This leads you into issues of daily life, and mortgages, and how to take care of aging parents, all of which has to do with political economy and society, and are thoroughly public. So, from here, you can start to branch out and talk about your relationship with other groups.

You truly cannot force people to discuss social issues. If you suddenly try to discuss things with young people that they are not yet aware of, they have every reason to be annoyed. Are young people really not interested in important issues? The enthusiasm for the play Che Guevara5 in 2000 vividly reflected young people’s need for a new discourse, a new social imaginary. But the problem is that a lot of the dialogue and discussion in the play was problematic. For example, in the play they said that post-modernism and feminism were reactionary Western things. The problem is not that they misunderstood feminism, but rather that this kind of abstract side-taking when engaging in criticism is problematic. If you want to talk about oppression, then what is the longest-lasting, most universal oppression humankind has known? Gender-based oppression. In a dialogue with the audience, the playwright Huang Jisu* (b. 1955) said “since we’re talking about Che Guevara, who cares if you are a man or a woman!” Everyone applauded. The audience was moved by the abstract idea of “oppression,” without considering that in reality, oppression always occurs in specific forms, including gender-based oppression, age-based oppression…

The other day I heard an interesting example: in some Indian villages, poor people can dig wells, and rich people can also dig wells, so on the surface, it looks like there is no oppression, but there is an unspoken rule that rich people can dig wells twice as deep as poor people. So, in times of drought, all of the underground water goes to the rich people, and poor people only have water when water is already abundant. Details concerning the depth of the wells are important, and only when we have done the research to figure out what myths or superstitions implanted these details and given them meaning will we understand what oppression is.

5 Translator’s note: “Che Guevara” was produced by a group of Chinese artists with financial support from private enterprises, and created a sensation throughout the country. Some praised it as a landmark achievement that revived the revolutionary genre of art, while others criticized it as crude propaganda.

There are lots of stories like this, for example, in Wenzhou, before the revolution, one particular body of fishermen were a special group, and could not inter-marry with the peasants, except in cases when the peasants were extremely poor. Women from the group of fishermen wore clothes that had to be buttoned in a different way from what was normal, so that everyone could see, even from far away, that she was a member of an underclass. That’s how extreme things were. So, we have to talk about concrete things like that, and figure out why divisions were so absolute in that kind of society, to the point of intentionally including clothing and hairstyles. Even if it is something quite distant from us, once you get the details right, I believe that everyone, both young and old, will enjoy listening to it, because now it is a story. The fiery language eventually cools off, but these kinds of concrete stories lodge themselves in people’s brains and slowly change the way people feel about life.

Empathetic Scholarship

Wu Qi: You place a lot of emphasis on “empathetic scholarship.” In fact, in daily life and in academic research we often try to understand others across different positions, but the results sometimes leave people frustrated, and some people finally even declare that understanding is impossible. What are your views?

Xiang Biao: I would say the opposite. Understanding is natural, and not difficult, although we often consciously or unconsciously refuse to understand. The key is how to avoid refusing to understand. Think about it—don’t we often feel that when we’re with friends it is easy to arrive at an understanding, but with those that are closest to us, such as our parents, understanding is harder? This makes me think: do they really not understand? Do they really not know what you are thinking? My feeling is that of course they know, and it is not that they don’t understand, in fact they are completely capable of understanding, but they simply refuse. Typical examples are decisions concerning sexual orientation and marriage. She wants to marry him or he wants to marry her—what’s not to understand? But for property considerations, or what the neighbors will think, or for reasons touching their own position in society, they refuse to understand something that is in fact very easy to understand. Understanding is a part of everyone’s basic nature, and as a psychological mechanism is not difficult at all, and if you say something is hard to understand, it is in fact a question of position, in other words, whether you are willing to put yourself in the other’s place. There are many situations in which people refuse to do this because there are personal interests at stake.

In this sense, I feel like academic research is not hard to do. In “empathetic scholarship,” you don’t necessarily have to draw out your research subject’s psychological mechanisms like a psychoanalyst would. Everything is a question of position—you have to describe the social position in which they find themselves and describe the set of relationships and the particular world in which they are, at which point everyone will naturally understand. In this sense, understanding is merely shared subjectivity.

Understanding must be based on sufficient knowledge, which is in turn based on empirical investigation. If I really want to understand you, then a casual chat is not enough, because I have no idea where your feelings come from, so I have to understand your world. This kind of investigation is the first step to true understanding. The mission of research is to understand something through finding something out, and on the basis of this understanding, constructing an explanation, so that after having understood, you know how the larger world is put together, only after which can you begin to answer certain questions. But I have reservations about interpretation. Interpretation means giving meanings to material. In empirical research, I pay more attention to understanding and explanation.

Wu Qi: To be even more specific, in the research process, can you completely understand what you are studying through interviews and observation? Maybe we can use your own research as an example. How do you break through that barrier? For example, how do you deal with a situation where someone’s words and deeds don’t match up?

Xiang Biao: In terms of traditional anthropology, this question is fairly easy to answer, because we used to work mainly on people who did not have their own written language. Since they did not have written history, and much of what they said sounded strange and irrational, so our only useful method was observation. Today, however, words and deeds not matching up is not a problem to break through but rather, as I would put it, a “fact to be embraced.” Society is built out of a lot of words and deeds that don’t match up. What we want to observe is precisely in what way they don’t match up, and not say that in so doing they are trying to fool us. Sometimes they may be fooling themselves. This happens a lot, for instance, people who gamble or take drugs and would like to quit but can’t, so often their words and deeds do not match up, which is true for corrupt officials as well. You cannot argue that his “words” are completely fake, nor his “actions” premeditated—both words and deeds must be seen as part of his behavior.

To give an example, I am currently working on a notorious instance of “urban renewal” in Beijing in November 2017,1 where there are many examples of conflicts between words and deeds. The Beijing government said they were protecting the migrants’ safety when evicting them from makeshift housing, but the migrants were left homeless. The government also decided that, following the demolition of the unsafe buildings, the areas must not be used for commercial redevelopment but should instead be used for building public facilities such as parks. They said that all of this was for the benefit of ordinary people. Was the government simply lying? The key is to analyze specific contradictions, to identify the exact discrepancies between words and actions. The fact that the government talked a lot about safety, means that the government is invested in this language, and we in turn can use this language to push for change. At the same time, we need to see where things went wrong in implementation, and gaps between words and deeds could be the starting points in thinking about what changes are feasible. My preliminary analysis is that the key to understanding the eviction campaign is not entirely that government and urban society discriminate and exclude migrants—which is the view of most people.

Contradictions are also found within the government, between different departments, and at different levels, in terms of the use of public land. The cleanup by the central government was in large part a cleanup of local governments’ practice of commercializing land use, including the military’s practice of renting out space under their control for commercial benefits. These practices provided migrants with temporary accommodations but created other problems such as overcrowding and unsafe living conditions. If you look carefully at how the campaigns evolved over months, first in Shanghai and then in Beijing, you will see that it did not happen suddenly at all. It was a struggle to centralize power over land use, a struggle that started some time ago. There is no doubt that migrants were victims of the crackdown, but appealing to humanitarian concerns is not sufficient. The questions become: is such power centralization sustainable? How will such centralization affect the migrants in the long run?

1 Translator’s note: In this instance, the municipal government launched a “campaign style” attack on migrants living in substandard housing. While the government’s treatment of migrant workers had generally grown more tolerant over time, this intervention was both sudden and brutal, and sparked considerable discussion and even protest. A description—and denunciation—of the campaign is available at https://www.readingthechina dream.com/guo-yuhua-original-intentions.html.

Wu Qi: Usually the way we—or the media—deal with problems like that is through anger. Their internal contradictions make us angry; they are clearly using state violence to do things that are wrong, which they then cover up with high-sounding language. So, we quickly take a stance against them, and draw a line in the sand. Later on, we might discover that this antagonism has made the problem more difficult to solve.

Xiang Biao: So, my point is that you have to get inside of all of this and understand the origin of the internal contradictions, and why in those circumstances they would resort of that kind of high-sounding discourse.

Wu Qi: In your view, what kind of social actions can this kind of academic understanding and explanation serve to guide? Or does it need to guide a social movement?

Xiang Biao: It is fairly clear to me that while I do not want to completely dismiss the possibility of social action, still, this is not something that we can plan. I feel that my work is basically intellectual work, and consists of providing tools that help everyone see and think. Especially in today’s situation, individuals and young people must themselves decide to take action, and it is not up to us to provide some kind of plan of attack, which is true of all heated social movements. Lenin said that “we are the vanguard,” who awaken the masses when they are not yet awakened. But in most situations, the people act first. My feeling is that youth today should not be too precipitous about taking action. More important is that their own daily lives, choices, and orientations need to take on their own voice.

Wu Qi: Talking about voice, two concrete voices occur to me. One is the voice of Lu Xun, whom you have already mentioned, which continues to serve as a direct stimulus among today’s youth via the Internet. Another voice is that of the author Fan Yusu*,2 a voice that, like others, emerges out of society. Voices like hers can quickly evoke a lot of empathy. How do you see these two voices? Is there any relationship between these voices and the academic work you already mentioned where you break through barriers and establish dialogues?

 2 Translator’s note: Fan Yusu is a migrant worker who published an account of her difficult, miserable life online in 2017, becoming instantly famous.

Xiang Biao: I don’t see much similarity. What I said was that we need to dig out the voices of young people, I meant that we need to refine the wisdom displayed by young people in their everyday lives and allow it to become a voice. Lu Xun’s voice is clearly an encouragement and an inspiration that comes from outside of our lives, a resource that can be absorbed into our lives.

Fan Yusu’s voice is also important and makes me think of our earlier discussion of centers and margins. Fan Yusu’s essays are outstanding and allow everyone to grasp the life experience of people who pass unnoticed, and the more we have of this kind of thing the better. But from another perspective, the fact that Fan’s writings evoke empathy has a lot to do with the relationship between the center and the margins—this is my personal reading, I have no proof of this. When I read her writing and the commentary it produced, what I find the most moving is that Fan was always such a talented girl—she memorized the 300 Tang poems when she was little and read The Dream of the Red Chamber*, and can write things like what she wrote, but she nonetheless wound up in a horrible situation. Most people’s concern for her is not for her working life as an ordinary person, but they feel instead like she should have been at the center and instead wound up on the margins, so there’s something tragic about her story. Most urban youth, when they read Fan Yusu’s writings, do not see an actual life with its pain and struggle, a life that is neither tragic nor comic. Instead, looking from the center, they see a congenial figure at the margin who is full of desire for the center, and in which there are elements of tragedy, thus reinforcing their self-positioning in the center. The words that appear most often in the comments on her writings are “fate” and “refusing to accept fate.”

Wu Qi: If we place too much emphasis on “empathy” is it easy to wind up with the view that “if it exists there must be a reason for it?”

Xiang Biao: No. When you see someone who is narrow, violent, someone who even commits crimes and kills people, one view is that this is a bad person, a demon, who was born like this and has always been like this. Another way to look at is to ask: how did they turn out like this? What childhood experience or current life situation might their character be related to? This necessarily leads us to think about the social context, as well as about the person’s internal state, their emotional life. This kind of understanding does not mean arguing that we can accept people who are narrow and violent. But it is only through understanding that we finally see what social problem needs to be addressed: you can’t just kill people right away, you have to think about communicating even with “bad” people, otherwise, our only choice with criminals is to let them go or to eliminate them. There is no hope of changing them through education. At the same time, if we understand, we naturally wind-up seeing parts of ourselves in the other and might wonder if we are becoming narrow and impatient.

Wu Qi: So, when we talk about “depth” in the social sciences, what do we actually mean?

Xiang Biao: “Depth” is always relative; the true reference points are different insights, and the key is the relationship between different insights. “Depth” means accurately grasping reality, and at the same time developing a new, critical understanding of existing insights. This does not mean simplistically overturning other people’s understandings, because other people have their own take on things, especially since many points of view have existed for years, and people see value in them, which means that there is something there. So, a deep understanding means not only an accurate grasp of the thing you are studying but also an understanding of where previous understandings came up short, which tells you what method to employ when you move on to study something else. “Depth” implies a weighty inter-subjectivity, involving the object of your research, other people, and power relations, so it is a networked ecology, and it requires that you place yourself within the system of knowledge production, which is the only way to achieve depth. Depth is not a matter of deduction. It is ecological, plural, and requires penetration.

Wu Qi: There is another word—we say that people “see through” something. To my mind, this idea seems to suggest that if I have understood something clearly enough then I wind up not caring about it, which means I either embrace it completely or I decide it is meaningless. From my perspective—or maybe it’s my age—I cannot completely accept this feeling because I want to believe that things can change. How do you see this?

Xiang Biao: That kind of “seeing through” doesn’t really hold water. If it did, then the world could not change, and history would be static. In fact, the world is constantly changing, so how do people who have “seen through” everything, explain that? The idea that everything is random and inexplicable goes against history. Depth comes from a networked structure of knowledge, and the cynical defeatist can return to their own little world where they buy their food and cook their dinner and pay attention to nothing else. “Seeing through” is a passive solution, one that seeks to maintain life with minimum engagement, but the person who lives this way is no longer thinking. This turns the living network of life into a dead end.

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